Analytical Approaches to World Musics
ISSN 2158-5296
2011, Volume 1, No. 1
AAWM JOURNAL Volume 1, No. 1 (2011)
Volume 1, No. 1 (2011)
Welcome to Analytical Approaches to World Music
On February 19-21, 2010, the First International Conference on Analytical Approaches to World Music (AAWM) convened on the campus of the University of Massachusetts Amherst. There, scholars from five continents representing the disciplines of music theory, ethnomusicology, musicology, cognitive psychology, computer science, and mathematics, as well as performers from a diverse array of musical cultures and traditions, came together with a common desire to engage in a unique cross-cultural and interdisciplinary dialogue, and in so doing, to promote and further enhance our collective understanding of the vast body of music we in the west commonly refer to as “world” music. What resulted was a compelling discourse that exceeded the expectations of all involved, and forcefully prompted the organizers to make the AAWM conference a biennial event. Indeed, plans are currently underway for the conference’s second installment, which will occur at The University of British Columbia in May of 2012.
The creation of the online journal Analytical Approaches to World Music represents an attempt to capture, sustain, and further extend this remarkable dialogue in a written format that is easily accessible to the widest possible audience. Within its pages, we aim to deliver the same broad spectrum of approaches, repertories, and musical issues in the form of articles, book reviews, letters to the editors, critical forums, and the like. In addition, the journal website will also host online discussion boards, with which we seek to provide a valuable forum for more informal discourse that fosters a stimulating exchange of ideas amongst scholars and musicians from across the globe.
We wish to thank the members of our Advisory Panel, Editorial Board, Editorial Staff, and many friends and colleagues who donated their creativity, energy, and time in order to make Analytical Approaches to World Music possible. Finally, we proudly dedicate the pages of this journal to the memory of Fabrizio Pellizzaro Ferreri, a jazz pianist, composer and ethnomusicologist whose innovative analytical approaches and cultural perspectives provided a powerful shaping force in the development of AAWM.
Lawrence Shuster and Rob Schultz, Editors
Tana Varnam-s: An Entry into Raga Delineation in Carnatic Music
Robert Morris
Tana varnam-s form a genre of Carnatic music that bridges the gap between pedagogical etudes and concert music. A varnam is a composition explicitly designed to present the raga in which it is composed in all of its subtleties of ornamentation, special phrases, and overall pitch movement; it teaches the student how to sing, perform, and eventually improvise in its raga, as well as serving as sort of raga dictionary, on which other compositions and performances are based.
Carnatic music is usually taught orally from teacher to student. But in recent years, supplements are often utilized, such as audio recordings and/or music published in Indian notation to help the student memorize compositions on her own.
An example of such pedagogical aids is the six-cassette recording called “Carnatic Lessons (Nottuswara Sahitya and Varnams)” sung and with commentary (in English) by S. Rajeswari, a lecturer in Tamil Nadu Government Music College. The tapes include the teaching sessions of 13 well-known varnams, in which Rajeswari sings each varnam phrase by phrase, first with Indian music note-names, then with the varnam’s text.
Another example is the book “Ganamrutha Varna Malika” by A. S. Panchapakesa Iyer, a collection of 41 varnams in Indian notation, also in English. The set of tapes and the publication provide data for an inquiry into raga structure via the analysis of raga patterns in three varnam-s found in both pedagogical sources: “Viriboni” in Bhairavi raga and Ata tala; “Vanajakshiro” in Kalyani raga and Adi tala; and “Intha Modi” in Saranga raga and Adi tala.
I study the way Rajeswari breaks up the compositions into phrases, what she emphases, and the way she sings the raga notes (before she joins them together into the melismatic text settings of the actual composition). This data is input to various computer programs in order to show typical patterns and ornamentations in the raga of each composition studied.
Analyzing Javanese Grimingan: Seeking Form, Finding Process
Sarah Weiss
In some styles of Javanese wayang kulit, grimingan flows forth from the hands of the gender player for nearly four of the eight or so hours that comprise an all-night performance. Although their performances are regularly punctuated by other musical events, sometimes a gender player will be asked to perform grimingan for 30-40 minutes without pause. How does a musician generate such an extended solo performance? It turns out that the answer depends on whom you ask. Some performers say that you can play anything as long as it is in the correct mode or pathet. Other gender players tell you that they just keep repeating ‘the melody.’ Through interviews and recording sessions, it gradually became clear to me that each performer did possess a collection of melodies designated for use in the creation of grimingan segments. Working outward from transcriptions of different performers’ grimingan melodies in what they described as their most compact form, and by transcribing more than 50 hours of performance, I have documented the process by which performers expand their versions of compact melodies to fill the necessary minutes of accompaniment. While their approaches to the process are necessarily idiosyncratic, a few rules can be derived to describe the process in each mode. Transcription and analysis have revealed the process by which the performers created their music. Understanding the process revealed the flexible but identifiable nature of the form of grimingan.
The Metric Matrix: Simultaneous Multidimensionality in African Music
David Locke
Although music typically is regarded as being temporally ephemeral, this model insufficiently theorizes African polyphonic music for dance in which performers set up dynamic steady states that present to the mind’s musical ear multiple simultaneous views that are constantly in a condition of non- resolving metamorphosis. This paper argues that when musicians compose and improvise, they intentionally design their musical choices to enable and maintain an open-ended quality. Musical syntax purposely serves the aesthetic goal of keeping the music in a constant state of becoming. Using the concepts of metric matrix and simultaneous multidimensionality, the paper will explore the nature of musical polysemy in Africa.
The internal structure of an “ensemble thematic cycle” (Nzewi) is a metric matrix. Beats, which contain sets of time-points, are the factors most present to consciousness. Since many beat streams co- exist in the matrix, a sounded phrase is subject to cognitive re-orientation depending on the flow of beats on which perception is grounded. Three-inthe-time-of-two (3:2) pervades music with beats of ternary structure. Ternary beats imply their binary/quaternary counterparts; 3:2 is an inseparable twinning of two complementary feelings of musical time. Each moment within the metric matrix has an inherent rhythmic valence that varies along a continuum from stability to motility. Simultaneous multidimensionality names a condition in which music is coherent from perspectives at the same time. Devices of simultaneous multidimensionality include: (1) dualism of tempo, (2) polyphonic perception, (3) equivocal phrase shape, (4) musical recycling, (5) meter as a matrix, and (6) polysemous phrases. Repetition is a crucial enabling condition by which the recurring multipart texture achieves a sculptural persistence.
Implicit Rāga Knowledge in the Kathmandu Valley
Richard Widdess
The term rāga is current not only in the classical traditions of North and South Indian music, where it is the subject of an extensive written and oral theory, but also in many non-classical traditions especially of religious music in South Asia. For example, devotional songs (dāphā) sung by groups of Newar farmers in the Kathmandu Valley, Nepal, are regularly attributed to rāgas; but there is little explicit (i.e. verbally expressed) knowledge about rāga among the performers. The question whether the concept has any musical meaning in terms of melodic structure can only be investigated through comparative musical analysis combined with ethnographic observation. An earlier study (Grandin 1997) concluded that dāphā song melodies in one rāga share a set of characteristic melodic formulae and are thus constructed in a rāga-like way. The present study suggests that rāga-preludes sung before each dāphā song constitute melodic models that underlie song melodies. A common stock of preludes is known by different groups, but singers are not aware of this commonality. There is thus an implicit melodic system that does not depend on performers’ explicit knowledge. This situation can be understood in historical and social terms.
The Hurrian Pieces, ca. 1350 BCE: Part One—Notation and Analysis
Jay Rahn
The least conjectural components of the earliest known system of musical notation (ca. 1850-500 BCE) are 14 names for pairs of strings. Each of these names designates a pair of numbered strings on a Mesopotamian harp or lyre. These numbered string-pairs provide a basis for analyzing the earliest musical scores that survive, 35 musical notations of Hurrian provenance ca. 1350 BCE. Of these 35 scores, only one, identified as ‘h.6’ by Assyriologists, appears to be intact from beginning to end, the remaining 34 being fragmentary because of damage during the past three and a half millennia. As well, like two of the other 34 scores, h.6 refers in its colophon to a numbered string-pair, namely, nitkibli, that plausibly designates a particular tuning of the 7 numbered strings. With a view to characterizing the repertoire as a whole and determining whether the three nitkibli pieces differ significantly from the other 32, the pieces’ numbered strings, string-pairs, and immediately successive string-pairs are analyzed in terms of relationships of sameness, adjacency and analogy. These relationships are defined within a framework of first-order logic. Analyzed statistically, the 35 pieces reveal considerable uniformity of idiom. Because it survives in a continuously notated form, h.6 can be analyzed in even greater detail and reveals a structure of great coherence that is quite consistent with tendencies among all 35 pieces.
Michael Tenzer
To advance any cross-cultural musicology we could do worse than to refine our perspectives on temporality. Yet labeling qualities of musical time–as if such qualities were static–locks in counterproductive essentializations, since old categories like linear and nonlinear time emerged from obsolete distinctions between the West and “the rest” and are based on misleading analogies to the physical world. Such polarized distinctions now seem insufficient. Indeed, any sense of stability in a temporal category is illusory, since even in musics of strict repetition, time and its perceivers are always moving. Thus it may be more productive to typologize temporal transformations, as a way to focus on unfolding process. This article begins to address the question of how many ways musical time can transform. Choosing the culturally and structurally weighted process of temporal augmentation as a case study, I focus on analysis and comparison of examples from Europe, South India and Indonesia. Explanations are sought for how a culturally informed listener perceives the unfolding of augmentation, and in so doing comes to reevaluate the sense of orientation in the music’s time.